Guns are white supremacy’s deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate.

The Washington Post ^ | January 31, 2021 | Sharon Risher

[Trump20162020]

The defining photograph of the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6 was that of a man strolling through the broken halls of our national Capitol, amid the smashed windows and assorted rubble of the failed coup, proudly brandishing a Confederate flag on his shoulder and hoping to overturn an election decided largely by Black voters. It’s an image that tells the story not only of Jan. 6 or of the Trump presidency, but also of all the steps that led to that moment — the whole history of hate in America captured in one frame.

This deadly connection between white supremacy and guns runs throughout our history. In 1866, armed Confederate loyalists stormed the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, murdering 34 Black Americans in an attempt to block suffrage for freed slaves. In 1898, an armed White mob in Wilmington, N.C., proclaimed a “White Declaration of Independence,” then killed at least 60 residents before replacing the multiracial local government with white supremacists. In 1921, mobs of armed White residents of Tulsa attacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering as many as 300 Tulsans for the crime of being Black and successful. In 1955, ­Emmett Till was tortured and shot in the head by White vigilantes. And today, mass shootings – from the church in Charleston to the supermarket in El Paso to the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. — have been committed by white supremacists filled with hate and armed with a gun.

Simply put, if the Confederate flag is the primary symbol of white-supremacist hate, the gun is its deadliest weapon.

[SkyDancer]

The country is closed down right now.

[RedElement]

Do you have a link for the article containing this graph? Appreciate your help.

[daniel1212]

hoping to overturn an election decided largely by Black voters

Fact checking?

The prevailing narrative of the last five years has been that Trump seized and maintains power by appealing to the desires of white voters and men (and especially, white men) to preserve the patriarchy and white supremacy. However, it seems difficult to square these talking points with the preliminary exit poll data from this year’s presidential race.

Let’s start with gender: across racial and ethnic groups, women shifted towards Trump this cycle. In the last election, Trump won white women by a margin of 9 percentage points. This year, he won by 11 percentage points. In 2016, Democrats won Hispanic and Latina women by 44 percentage points; in 2020 they won by 39. Last cycle, Democrats won black women by 90 percentage points. This year, by 81 points... Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump gained 4 percentage points with African Americans, 3 percentage points with Hispanics and Latinos, and 5 percentage points with Asian Americans. The shifts described in Edison’s exit polls are verified by AP Votecast, which showed similar movement among black and Hispanic voters this cycle. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/14/joe-biden-trump-black-latino-republicans)

Meanwhile even https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/08/roy-blunt/blunts-wrong-trump-did-not-get-highest-minority-vo/ states that Trump won an estimated 26% of the overall minority vote, which ranks as the second best showing in the past 100 years by a Republican candidate, trailing only the 2004 election in which George W. Bush received 28% of the vote."